As water specialists, we care a lot about our clients being able to provide good water service to their customers on a sustained basis, but many utilities in the countries we work for struggle to provide consistent service. Imagine how much more challenging this will become in the next two decades, when two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. [1]By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in areas with absolute water scarcity.[2]

Non-Revenue Water (NRW) is water that is placed into a water distribution system and not billed because of leaks or commercial failures. Efficient management of NRW offers significant financial benefits to utilities while bringing economic and environmental benefits to societies around the world. Why, then, does NRW still present governments with such intractable problems?